


You Can See a Million Miles Tonight But You Can't Get Very Far

by dancinguniverse



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/pseuds/dancinguniverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust in Alaska.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Can See a Million Miles Tonight But You Can't Get Very Far

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Agnes_Bean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agnes_Bean/gifts).



> Title from the Counting Crows.

Rust opens the truck’s door somewhere in Alberta and feels the cold stop his breath. He’s been driving for two days already, the temperature dropping steadily, but this is the first time it steals into his throat, freezes up the inside of his nose, tightens the corners of his eyes. It feels like fists driving into him, violent and justified, and Rust almost flinches, favoring an eye still bruised and purple. He pushes himself out of the car though, accepts this penance just like the other. He zips his coat higher. He’ll need real winter gear again. For now he walks into the gas station, limping a little, and buys a large coffee and a tank of gas.

Marty might call it masochism, because Marty knows more five dollar words than he likes to pretend, but it’s not that. It’s human nature to want balance. Rust is not a good man. He serves a purpose of sorts, but it doesn’t outweigh everything else. He could punish himself for his wrongs, but there’s no utility in that. But he won’t shy from punishment anyone else wants to mete out, from Marty to the biting wind. It’s nothing more than he deserves.

Rust replaces the gas nozzle, climbs into the truck, and keeps driving north.

* * *

He finds a fishing boat short one crew member and signs up, loses himself on the water, in back-breaking work and frigid salt air and nights that last most of the day, for six weeks. He grew up in these towns, but he’s never worked a commercial rig before. The work isn’t complicated but it isn’t easy either, and these men are long on experience and short on patience. Rust can tell his accent doesn’t help. He endures the commentary, gets renamed every Texas city these dumb fucks have ever heard of, and pushes on. He doesn’t make friends, but for once he thinks maybe that has nothing to do with him.

He makes it through without losing a finger or worse but at the end of it, as they round the jetty, he watches the moods of the rest of the crew lighten with relief, and can only think, _Well_. The youngest of the crew, a man a decade younger than Rust but with at least that much experience on him, claps him on the back and offers to buy him a drink. Rust hadn’t fucked up anything too big or gotten himself killed, so he guesses now he’s acceptable. He lets Dave order them whiskey, drinks it down, and leaves before he has to buy the next round or contribute more to the conversation than comments on busted lines and sudden squalls.

The boat stint leaves him with money in his pocket, and he buys himself a bottle all of his own and the cheapest motel room he can find. The next morning he stares at the cracked ceiling and decides to finish the trip. Why else come all this way? He finds the store in town, loads up on canned soup and coffee, and shows up four hours later at a door he hasn’t seen in decades. His memories have grown hazy through the years, softened by time, so he can’t say for sure how much Travis has changed, but the sharp planes of his face look familiar to Rust’s eye. Travis blinks at him, chewing on the inside of his cheek, before he backs up into the house.

“Well,” he says. “Better come in then.”

He asks only two questions that first day: “That everything?” when Rust brings in his duffel and groceries, and then, as they are stacking cans and clearing Rust a sleeping space, “Been back long?”

Rust answers, “Yeah,” and, “A few weeks,” and asks how they’re set for fuel.

He stays for two weeks, patches up things Travis has let go. It’s fall in Alaska and fixing a busted window might not rank with solving a murder, but it's not make work. If he can't see the age in Travis' face, he can see it in the house, in what he's let go. Rust fixes what he can, then heads back to the boat. There's always somebody short a man, and the work puts money in his pocket, keeps him busy enough not to think too much. The next time he drives out, a month later, he brings lumber. He can't do the roof until spring at least, and then only if he's got the money, but he can patch the hole in the shed, stop the snow from driving in. 

In small pieces, doled out across fishing holes and passed between bottles, Rust fills in the gaps he's left in Travis' understanding of his life. It's how they've always done things. They've never sat down to talk, but sometimes the words come easier when there's a task at hand. Rust doesn't need to look up, can keep his eyes on a fishing line or a fresh-killed deer, but he knows Travis hears him when he speaks, even if there aren't any words in return. What could he say anyway?

The boats bring in money. Not much, but they don't use much out there at the cabin, Rust and Travis. Rust does his job on the boats so he's kept on, but he doesn't bother making friends and that unsettles people, some more than others. Less here than in Louisiana though. There's a small town mentality to the place, a defensive huddle against the weather nine months out of the year, but a marked streak of independence too, that lives and lets live easier than in the South. Rust doesn't mind that change at all.   
  
He's sitting with the crew in the boat's cabin one night around year two (because there's nowhere else to sit in a boat that size when it's minus fifty above deck), when that sentiment fails, probably due to sheer boredom. He finds himself being addressed by one of the hands who's had enough whiskey to think anyone wants to hear his opinions about Rust's mother and her probable levels of excitement for Charlie's manhood.   
  
Rust just turns a page in his book. "She's probably been dead ten years or more, so if that's your speed, go get 'em."   
  
Charlie looks like he's thinking about starting something, but they all look over in surprise when Alex, their makeshift mechanic, cracks up. All except Rust, who flinches because it's Marty's laugh, only half a note off. He goes back to not speaking much after that. 

By spring of that year he's got funds to do the roof, so the next year he moves on to the chimney, which has seen better days. It keeps him busy and also not dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, so it's worth his time. 

Rust had spent a lot of time in North Shore thinking about his purpose in life. That even if it was all without any overarching meaning, he could do something useful with his time. That given the existence of the human race, of consciousness, flawed as it was, he could do what he could with his remaining time to maintain at least the tenuous illusion of reason and order. He hadn’t counted on the network of human degradation not just sprawling across the land, but deliberately constructed from the top down. The work had always been futile and he'd acknowledged that, but he had hit his limits. They all had them. That was fine. Why should be be stronger than anyone else? He’d stopped hoping for meaning after Sophia. This was just one more step down the ladder. Maybe one day he’d find the door to override his programming, take the final step.

He thought about it, in the middle of more than one endless night out on the ocean. He could step off. It was quiet, no one would notice until it was beyond correction. He thought about it, and then stepped back. Not yet. There was still the smoker shed to fix up (most of the summer of year four), or the sled that needed mending (one Monday afternoon, September of year five). Maybe when his work was done. It was smaller work now, perhaps less important, but still his. 

A part of the body, he’d told Maggie forever ago. And he’d done his best, worked the job, made the best of a partner who was hostile only when he remembered to be, tucked Rust away like a favorite pocketknife the rest of the time. He was useful and half-forgotten in his familiarity, kept ever close to hand, but not a tool to be trusted to others. Laurie had been a sheath, like her presence meant he was finally safe around Maggie, unable to cut. Marty had never seen Maggie as the knife. Not that it mattered now.

Rust had thought he could make a stand. He couldn’t shoot every meth head who went off, but he was a good detective. He could be the man at the door. He hadn't counted on the Tuttles of the world, thought Ginger and his ilk were the worst the world had to throw at him, because really, what could be worse than the callous nature of chance and a careless driver, a poorly placed turn in the road? He'd thought at least he had backup, when shit went down. More fool him. He thinks about the work left to do down there sometimes but it tires him and besides, there's the snowshoes to mend. Tuttle is on his list but farther down, like the dangling hooks in the tool shed. 

He’d done his best, and now his sights are lower. The next catch. The next season. Get through. 

It's coming up on eight years when Rust comes back from a shift--crabbing this time--and the familiar white plume of hot air escaping through the vents is missing. It's always quiet out here, but the silence now is complete and perfect, the latest snow undisturbed between the house and the shed.

Rust opens the door, already knowing what he will find, and doesn't step through for a minute. The unmoving figure on the floor doesn't move either, and Rust's list of tasks melts away like snow. Rust makes the proper calls and while he’s waiting for the coroner--even Alaska has civilization--he checks the fuel on the truck, starts throwing shit back into his footlocker.

He’s got just one thing left to do.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Five Times Rust Cohle Stayed Alive (the lend your lungs to me remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212717) by [ariadnes_string](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string)




End file.
